Puppets and Planes at Rotunda Gallery

Our DSW/PS 27 School Arts Partnership Grant project is currently on display at BRIC's Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn Heights, in the 16th Annual KidsArt Exhibition, curated by my colleague Hawley Hussey. The teachers (Shariffa Martinez, Andrew DeMers, Sandy DeFrancesco and Elizabeth Pavis) and I took all three classes, Pre-K, Early Kindergarten and K-1 (Self-Contained), to the gallery to interact with their own videos made over the course of the year, their backdrop and props (puppets and planes), and some representative picture story books compiled by my co-teaching artist Terry Solowey. What a wonderful culminating event of this year-long project!

Ark at MCV/NYC

Ark, our 15 minute video from 2002 (about which I wrote my Ed.M. thesis), featuring four family groups of children from Brooklyn, in a mysteriously linked story about dolls, seeds and a box, has been installed for the past month, with the dolls, box and all eight costumes, at Artspace MCV/NYC in Brooklyn. We were thrilled to be part of the show "Risus," which benefited Toys for Tots, and to meet the artists/curators behind MCV, who were gracious enough to build out a beautiful corner of the gallery just for Ark. Thank you Jason, Sean and Lauren.

Bringing the Outside In

Two weekends ago, starting on a farm in western MA and ending up in Cambridge at Lesley University, I did video documentation for a wonderful Reggio Emilia Institute led by Dave Kelly of Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center, Cathy Topal of Smith College, Brigid McGinn of Pratt Institute, and Lella Gandini, U.S. Liaison for the Dissemination of the Reggio Emilia Approach. I am grateful to Kristina Lamour of the Art Institute of Boston and Brigid for inviting me to document this weekend full of beauty.

This three day experience was an amazing combination of a beautiful misty morning by the stream, summer camp, a personal hike through the woods, a journey into the minds of young children, and a collective, organic process of artmaking in reference to natural materials. The collective unconscious was truly at work, as pre-school teachers from all over the United States were invited outside to make sculptures that had a relationship with the land, and inside to manipulate clay such that its shape would echo seedpods, shells and branches. I felt that through the video camera lens, I was seeing my own artistic dreams played out by many hands. It was beautiful to see so many teachers be artists; and to think that this was all done in the service of becoming more attuned to the lives, thoughts, dreams and learning styles of 2-5 year olds. . . and on up through 5th grade and beyond, was truly life-affirming.

This event also called to mind the book I have been reading, Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv. The Children & Nature Network has many resources regarding the issue of children's outdoor play, and the more I think and read about it, the more I realize that outdoor play is the primary type of play I am advocating for, through the Digital Story Workshop videos. Children need to have freeing, beautiful experiences living and learning outside of school walls, far out in the meadows, forests, gardens, creekbeds, beaches, and mountains. We educators who are aware of the potential of outdoor adventures and projects to improve upon the life of the mind and spirit must be sure to provide such opportunities for the children around us.

The Imagination is a Very Powerful Thing

Last week, my friend Kathy's son, Milo, 9, watched Ark for the first time, and he made these effortlessly profound statements and descriptions:
• Are they looking for the sea or what? Are they looking for a map of the sea?
• It's like a scavenger hunt.
• I guess they're using their imagination. The imagination is a very powerful thing.
• Oh look, it comes back to the beach; I always thought that would happen. It could go to all these places--to China!
• [The narrator of the last scene says "cause if you don't tell a dream, it might come true. I knew that it was gonna come true."] Sometimes the universe speaks to you in dreams. The universe spoke to her.
• It was hard to open. . . probably because it was very, very old.
• They kept on adding dolls. . . through generations.
• The universe is very strong to that family.
• The dream was completely true about everything. Every single thing.
• [The children put the box in the ocean]. Just as it has been, for generations and generations.
The contemplative Ark seems to have held the gaze of this thoughtful child who I thought was at the higher end of the age spectrum. Turns out that Kids First! Film Festival's child jury named Ark an official selection this year, and the festival labelled it appropriate for a 5-12 year old audience. That was a jump into the older regions of childhood, for Ark, but after hearing Milo's fascinating commentary, I agree that the 9-12 year-old set should definitely see it.

Notice that above, in Milo's drawing of the lid from the box, which the children discover and interact with throughout the story, he includes a representation of the photograph that is part of the inside of the lid of the box, so it's a drawing of a photograph, but not only that: Milo has drawn the box itself into that photograph. Once he told me that, I pulled out the real box itself and showed it to him, and he checked to see if the box was there in the photograph, inside the box lid. It was not. But shouldn't it have been?

Here are two more works of art Milo made that day, "Deep Space" and "Abstract":